Trauma doesn’t just live in the mind. It takes root in the body, in muscle tension, breath patterns, heart rate, and posture. In the absence of safety, the body adapts, holds, waits. And often, long after the danger has passed, the body remains alert. Stuck. Trying to finish something that never got to end.

For a long time, therapy focused on the story: on memory, insight, and narrative. But some things are hard to say. Some things happened before there were words. Some things were felt, not spoken. And so, the body carries them.

Somatic therapy doesn’t replace talking, it deepens it. As Babette Rothschild writes, “Bridging the gap between the verbal psychotherapies and the body-psychotherapies means taking the best resources from both.” Trauma recovery, she reminds us, requires tools for working with both body and mind. You can’t have one without the other.

This post is a way of tracing the lineage of that idea. We’ll explore how somatic therapy came to be, where its roots lie, and what unites the many disciplines that have approached the body not just as a physical thing but as the very ground of experience. This is not a complete history but an invitation to remember what has always been known in some way: that healing can be spoken, and also sensed, moved, trembled through, and embodied.

The Body as a site of knowledge and healing

The body is not an object we possess, but the place we live in and from. It holds memory, meaning, and the capacity to heal. But many of us were not raised to experience the body this way. Under capitalism, the body is something to push through. In grind culture, it’s expected to produce, perform, and endure. Under patriarchy and white supremacy, the body becomes a site of control, regulated, objectified, or erased. In rape culture, the body is not yours, it is theirs. It is something to survive in.

Much of Western thought has reinforced this split: mind over body, reason over feeling. But there have always been countercurrents. Across philosophy, education, movement, and spiritual traditions, people have returned again and again to the body, not just as a biological system, but as a source of intelligence. A way of knowing. A place of resistance and healing.

Somatic therapy grows from these threads. It asks: what if the body is not the problem, but the ground? What if healing doesn’t just happen through thinking or talking but also through moving, sensing, pausing, trembling, breathing again

Somatics as a reclamation of embodied knowing

In Western society, this field doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It builds on traditions that challenged the idea that thinking is superior to feeling, that learning happens only in the head, or that change is purely cognitive.

In philosophy, Merleau-Ponty placed the body at the heart of perception, not as passive, but as the very thing that allows us to encounter the world. In education, Montessori, Dewey, and Alexander developed systems rooted in the idea that experience is not separate from the body, but formed through it. In each of these traditions, we find a refusal to treat the body as a machine, a container, or a problem to fix.

Instead, the body becomes a place to come home to. A site of deep knowing.

Healing as a process of reconnection

In trauma work, the body often remembers what the mind cannot: the freeze response, the collapsed spine, the sudden hyper-vigilance in a room that feels “safe.” These are not dysfunctions, they are adaptations. The body protects us in the best way it knows how. But when the danger has passed, those same protections can become barriers.

Somatic approaches help re-pattern the body’s response. Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, Pat Ogden, and others developed methods to support the body in finding its way out of trauma loops: not by pushing or explaining, but by creating the conditions for safety, movement, and choice.

This is not just about trauma as a psychological event: it’s about trauma as a disruption in the body’s ability to orient, act, and recover. Healing becomes a process of reconnection, of feeling agency return, not in theory, but in the breath, in the spine, in your legs.

Forgotten or marginalised lineages in somatic therapy

Most histories of somatic therapy start in the 20th century. Maybe a nod to yoga or mindfulness, framed as helpful adjuncts. But this view is narrow. It overlooks the fact that embodied healing has always existed in many forms, across many cultures, long before somatics became a field or a trend.

Somatics did not begin in the west

In many Indigenous and non-Western traditions, the body has always been central to healing. In Chinese medicine, energy (qi) is understood as moving through the body in patterns, shaping both physical and emotional well-being. In Ayurveda, the body is seen as part of a larger ecological and spiritual system, where imbalance, not just pathology, is the root of suffering. Across African, Indigenous American, and Pacific Islander cultures, healing is inseparable from the land, the community, and the body’s rhythmic connection to both.

These are somatic practices. They are not “alternatives” or “add-ons.” They are whole systems that engage with trauma, illness, and disconnection through body, spirit, and relationship. Yet, in the mainstream somatic therapy discourse, they’re often sidelined, or worse, cherry-picked and repackaged without credit, context, or reciprocity.

This isn’t just about giving credit. It’s about resisting a kind of epistemic violence: the way Western psychology has historically claimed authority by fragmenting and rebranding what others already knew, a new form of colonialism.

Healing through movement, rhythm, and ritual

In many cultures, healing doesn’t happen in a room with one other person. It happens in movement, in music, in ritual. Through dance. Through drumming. Through the body in rhythm with others.

Ritual isn’t just symbolic, it’s somatic. It works through repetition, intention, and embodied presence. In collective ceremonies, trauma is not treated as an isolated wound, but as something that is carried, held, and transformed together.

This is a powerful counterpoint to the highly individualised model of Western therapy. And while somatic therapy has begun to reintroduce movement and nonverbal expression, it still often centres the self as the site of healing, rather than the collective, the ancestral, the land.

There is something to learn here, not to borrow or co-opt, but to listen. To recognise that what we now call somatic therapy is part of a much older, wider, and deeper story about the body and about what it means to heal in relationship, to others, to place, to history.

One thread in the broader weave

What would it mean to widen the map of somatic therapy, to see it not as a modern innovation but as a remembering?

This means acknowledging that many of the practices we now call somatic, grounding, breathwork, and movement have long existed in spiritual, artistic, and communal forms. It means decentering whiteness in somatic lineages. It means resisting the urge to extract tools from cultural contexts without deep engagement, consent, or reciprocity.

And perhaps most importantly, it means recognising that healing through the body is not new, nor is it exclusive to any single tradition. What we now call somatic therapy is one contemporary, Western way of working with the body but long before it had a name, the body was already a place of ritual, repair, and remembering.

To frame modern somatic therapy as a bridge between “body” and “mind” risks centring a split that many cultures never made in the first place. It is not about fusing the best of East and West or claiming completeness—it’s about acknowledging that this is one expression, shaped by its own histories and limitations.

As Western practitioners, our task is not to universalise what we do, but to situate ourselves humbly within a much broader, older field of embodied knowing. A field where the body has always been more than muscles and nerves. It is memory, land, resistance, rhythm, and story. And to practice somatically is to return to that.

Somatic therapy in context: power, land and the future of embodied healing

As somatic therapy gains visibility, it’s worth asking: Who defines the field? Whose bodies are centred, whose knowledge is cited, and whose histories are acknowledged, or erased?

Across its many lineages, somatic practice has always been more than a set of techniques. It is a way of listening to the body as a site of memory, protest, belonging, and possibility. But in the process of becoming professionalised, certified, and Westernised, somatic therapy has sometimes been detached from the deeper contexts that shaped it: spiritual, ecological, political, and communal. And don’t get me wrong, this is how I entered this space, to then soon realise that the way I wanted to embody this way of working and being (more attuned to the body) was not just a “restore your nervous system” exercise.

We can’t talk about healing the body without acknowledging the forces that shaped it: capitalism, colonisation, rape culture, white supremacy. Many bodies have been made to carry more, and to be heard less. The somatic field is no exception: healing cannot be separated from the social and political landscapes in which it takes place.

Somatics as justice-oriented practice

There is no single origin of somatic healing. Indigenous, African, Asian, and diasporic cultures have always engaged the body in practices of regulation, grief, joy, and collective restoration through dance, rhythm, stillness, breath, and ritual. Many of these have been extracted or appropriated into Western wellness culture without context or reciprocity.

A truly somatic approach means re-membering—putting back together what has been split or severed. This includes remembering that the wisdom of the body doesn’t belong to any one person, culture, or profession. Somatic therapy, in this light, becomes less about importing practices, and more about cultivating relationships: to place, to history, to each other, to the body as it is, wounded, wise, whole.

The Body is not a closed system

In my own practice, I’ve learned that the body is not a machine to be fixed or a mindless vessel to be interpreted. It is porous. It is shaped by landscape, by time, by history. Somatic healing often begins with one person, but it rarely ends there. It radiates outward, into how we relate to others, into how we inhabit land, into how we imagine what healing can mean.

We must move beyond the binary of East vs. West, or ancient vs. modern, and ask different questions. How do we listen to bodies that have been ignored? How do we honour the practices we draw from, without erasing where they come from? What does it mean to practice healing inside systems that make healing so necessary?

How language shapes the body and vice versa

In somatic therapy, we often say that healing happens beyond words. But that doesn’t mean language is irrelevant. It means we need to expand what we think language is for and where it lives.

Babette Rothschild reminds us that “the somatic disturbances of trauma require language to make sense of them, comprehend their meaning, extract their message, and resolve their impact.” The body speaks, but it doesn’t always speak in sentences. It might tremble, shut down, or contract. It might ache or go numb. And yet, when we offer words that land (not explanations, but attuned presence, metaphor, rhythm), we make space for something to unfold. Language becomes less about description and more about contact.

This is where poetry lives. The language of Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, or even the slow cadence of a therapist’s voice can move us closer to something embodied, something remembered. Poetics are not a detour from somatic work, they are one of its tools.

And just as the body can be silenced by trauma, so too have many bodies been denied the right to speak. Some voices were never expected to have language. Some were punished for using it. Race, gender, class, disability, all have shaped whose embodiment is listened to, whose suffering is named, and whose healing is deemed legitimate.

In somatic trauma therapy, we listen for the words unspoken. We attune to the pauses, the dissonance, the rhythm underneath the narrative. We work with the truth that language can both wound and repair.

Healing with the Earth: the role of land in somatic therapy

When we speak of trauma, we often speak of rupture, disconnection, dislocation, a body no longer feeling like home. But what if some of that rupture is not only internal, but also environmental? What if trauma is not just stored in muscles or fascia, but also in what’s been lost: land, culture, community, belonging?

To practise somatic therapy outdoors, or with an eco-somatic lens, is to acknowledge that healing is not only about what happens inside the body. It’s also about how the body meets the world. The quality of air. The rhythm of the seasons. The memory held in trees and rivers. The silence of a forest that allows a nervous system to recalibrate. In this way, nature is not a backdrop for therapy, it’s an active participant.

For those working with trauma, especially intergenerational or collective trauma, place matters. Displacement, through colonisation, migration, environmental destruction, is not just a historical fact. It lives in bodies as a sense of groundlessness, of loss without language. Somatic therapy can help reconnect us to this missing ground, not metaphorically, but literally. Feet on soil. Breath in wind. A body that remembers where it belongs.

This isn’t romanticism. It’s reclamation. It’s the opposite of grind culture and disembodiment. It’s a slow return to rhythms that capitalism, white supremacy, and environmental degradation have tried to erase.

And it’s not just individual. The body is not separate from the world it’s in. When we begin to see the body as ecosystem, we understand healing as something communal, reciprocal, even political. We care for the land not just because it sustains us, but because our bodies are it. We cannot separate somatic healing from the ecological crisis we’re living through.

This is the ground of eco-somatic therapy: a practice that recognises the body as a place of connection, resistance, and return. Not just to ourselves, but to the world we’re part of.

The future of Somatic Therapy: where do we go from here?

Somatic therapy is at a turning point. As more people turn to body-based approaches for trauma healing, regulation, and reconnection, the field finds itself simultaneously expanding and interrogating its own roots. Where are we headed? What does a more embodied, inclusive, and accountable future look like?

This chapter is not a conclusion. It’s an invitation to stay in relationship with what has come before, to engage critically with where we are, and to imagine what’s possible from here.

Staying with the complexity

Somatic therapy has always resisted a one-size-fits-all approach. At its best, it honours complexity.

The future of somatic therapy depends not just on developing new methods, but on deepening our accountability. It means rooting our work in context, not just technique. It means acknowledging that somatic knowledge doesn’t begin or end in professional training or clinical settings. It also lives in lived experience, ancestral practice, disability culture, movement lineages, poetry, protest, parenting, community care, and grief.

Whose bodies, whose healing?

As we look ahead, we must ask: whose voices have shaped the somatic field and whose have been left out? We can no longer afford a version of body-based healing that universalises trauma without recognising difference. That centres whiteness, while borrowing from Black, Indigenous, and non-Western practices. That sells regulation without speaking of resistance.

A future-forward somatic practice must account for:

• Power, privilege, and access

• Cultural and geographic context

• Historical harm and collective trauma

• The body not as an isolated vessel, but as relational, shaped by land, language, community, and systems

Healing a relationship, not an endpoint

Somatic therapy is not a static modality. It’s a living process. A practice. A way of being with the body, not just your own, but the wider body of community, land, and lineage.

We don’t need to make it neat. We don’t need to declare mastery. What we need is space: to listen more deeply, to move with greater integrity, and to remain in relationship.